Across Time & Space Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Jessica: Welcome to Thoughts & Prayers, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, inspiring new connections to Jewish Prayer in a changing world. I’m Jessica Fisher.

One morning during my year of studying in Israel in rabbinical school, I stepped off the bus in Tzfat at 4:00 AM to hop between different Sephardic slichot services with my classmates. While most Ashkenazi Jewish communities begin reciting these penitential prayers the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, Sephardim and Mizrachim begin including them in the early morning hours for the entire month of Elul. I was excited to experience a tefillah I wouldn’t be able to access at home, and it was incredible to hear the chorus of voices crying out to God in ancient unfamiliar tunes, as the sun was just beginning to rise. 

But it was also crushing to enter synagogue after synagogue only to find that this was a ritual primarily for men. In sanctuary after sanctuary, we found that there were no other women in attendance and often there was no section for women to even sit in. When we went to a building where I ended up repenting in a broom closet, I finally gave up and decided to sit out the last stop of our morning. 

The vocabulary and technologies of our prayers presuppose a connection to the Jewish people. Most of the words in our siddurim are written in the plural, and many prayers can only be set in the presence of others. Prayer can be a powerful source of connection to other Jews. I’ve heard many parents say that their goal for their child’s Jewish education is for their kid to be able to walk into any synagogue in the world and feel like they belong there, or at least know what’s going on.

But the diversity of the Jewish people often leaves us unable to pray together, even if all of our prayers are shaped by similar building blocks. Different Jewish communities rely on divergent liturgical traditions or have fundamental disagreements about words, obligations, and membership. 

In this final episode of Thoughts & Prayers, we’re looking at the ways that prayer can be both a tool for strengthening our sense of belonging to the Jewish people and the ways that praying as a collective can be challenging.

To start, I spoke to Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield, CEO of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a shofar blower for her community.

Rachel, I’m so glad to be in conversation with you. So much of this show has centered around prayer as a written codified liturgy, but shofar transcends the page while still retaining this ancient through line. Why do you think the sounds of the shofar are able to speak to people in a way that liturgy often doesn’t?

Rachel: I think that sometimes liturgy can get in the way for people, that the words—they feel alienating or they feel like it’s not just quite what they want to say. And I think for many people, just the sound of the shofar is so evocative for them, so powerful, whether they’re hearing it, whether they’re feeling the vibrations of it, that it connects them to memories of, of childhood and synagogue, that it connects them to people everywhere who are hearing those same sounds. And sometimes sound itself is more powerful than words because you can map onto it the feelings that you want to. 

Some say that the sound of the shofar is the sound of the mother of Siesra or Sarah crying for their children. That notion that a sound can be almost a feeling that evokes human emotion or that mimics human emotion. I think that’s part of why Shofar in particular, is such a poignant and beautiful and powerful sound for people. 

Jessica: It also makes it such a pluralistic sound, right? Because you can access it at different levels and in different ways. You know, bringing whatever and whoever you are into your encounter with it. 

Rachel: I’m thinking about the kids with their stopwatches timing, how long the tekiah gedolah is. That’s one way to listen. 

Jessica: And the adults. 

Rachel: And the adults. And then I’m thinking about the people who just, like, close their eyes and listen. The people who cry, because somehow that sound breaks open something in them. It’s a very, very powerful sound. It’s just the breath in the horn of a ram, and it makes this incredible noise that means so much and has meant so much for millennia to the Jewish people. 

Jessica: Yeah, and there’s also a way to plug in your own story, right? Like you said, Sisera’s mother, or Sarah crying, but when I cry, because of the sound of the shofar. It also puts me in conversation with those other people who have cried. 

Rachel: That’s right. And in that way it is, it’s the ultimate peoplehood sound, right? It’s the sound that the Jewish people recognize as their sound. In fact, when you know you see Jews out on the street protesting or celebrating, we often bring Shofars with us because we know that it’s a unique sound that represents our calling out, our calling out for help for justice, for compassion, for whatever it is that we need. 

Jessica: So powerful. And you actually, you hold both sides of the shofar equation because you’re not only somebody who listens to the shofar, but you actually blow it yourself. And when I think about what it means to blow the shofar, it actually is quite similar to the prayer leader, the person who is the shaliach, or shelichat tzibbur, who’s the emissary on behalf of the community. 

For you, how does blowing the shofar as the representative of your community connect you to outside of your community?

Rachel: Yeah. It does feel like that. It has this power. Like the moment before I blow, you know, the last tekiah gedolah, either on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, I have this sense of like, okay, my job is to bring together the collective prayers of the Jewish people in this room, outside this room, across the world, even over time, and to lift them up and to create kind of a portal to God’s ear and it’s that sensibility that I summon before I blow, and to me that feels like transcendent beyond the moment in the room. It feels like I’m participating in a ritual—and we all are—that’s happening both simultaneously across space and across time. 

Jessica: Yeah. How do you set that up for yourself? I mean, I can imagine thinking to myself, okay, right now I am going to blow the shofar and it’s going to connect me to other Jews, across the world, across time, across space. But how do you actually enact that for yourself? 

Rachel: Yeah, so I close my eyes, I hold the shofar in my hands and just get really attached to the physicality of it. I try to slow my breath down and then I think to myself. Your job is just to be an emissary. This is not about you. This is about the breath coming through you and making this sound. This is about the passion of all of the people around you who are praying and their desire for their prayers to be heard, and your job is to open the door. So breathe. Get in there and make it happen. 

So there’s that part which feels really transcendent and powerful and almost like an out of body experience. But then there’s also the very present reality of the moment, which I’m always reminded of the minute I stop blowing, and the sound is echoing in the air, and I open my eyes. It reminds me of a particular incident where—a particular moment, I should say—when I was blowing it was during COVID. We were in a tent and I was blowing the last tekiah gedolah, I think, of Rosh Hashanah, and I opened my eyes and looked down and there was this little girl looking up at me with her huge blue eyes, just, mouth dropped.

And in that moment I felt both the particularity of that moment standing there in front of that little girl, in that shul, on that occasion, and also the kind of intersection of that with the transcendence of that moment I just described, of kind of bringing together a converging point, over time and over place of the Jewish people everywhere. 

And isn’t that the truth about Jewish peoplehood? It’s at once, about our very particular experiences, and at the same time, about the whole community. And that image will stick with me always as the power of like what keeps me grounded when I’m trying to do this big thing that’s about the whole people, and at the same time, there’s a little girl standing looking up at me who needs to hear this call as well. 

Jessica: Such a beautiful image. Thank you, Rachel, for sharing these reflections. 

Rachel: Thank you. That was Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield, the Chief Executive Officer of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

I’ve heard from several friends in recent months who describe how painful it is to try to pray in a community when they disagree with a congregation’s politics or just disagree with the person who sits next to them in services. This kind of dissonance can impact our relationship with both prayer and the Jewish people.

I invited Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, to reflect on the difficulty of praying with people we aren’t aligned with and why it’s so important to keep doing it anyway.

Yehuda: When I was in high school, my family was assigned high holiday seats in our synagogue, which placed me directly behind a kid who was my arch nemesis at the time. This was really distracting. I found him to be kind of a clown, a little bit of a bully. I think he thought I was pompous, a little condescending. And I think in retrospect we were probably both right, but there was a lot of hostility between us and we engaged in a lot of stink eye over the high holidays, rolling our eyes at each other, making faces. And seeing that it’s one of the few things I actually remember from those services, I guess it kind of ruined the prayer experience. 

I knew then that I should have been thinking about lofty things and maybe even all of the ways I had wronged him. That’s what the high holidays are for. Instead, I spent my time nursing the wounds about the ways he had wronged me. We never achieved much reconciliation, although I hold no hard feelings against him now. Although one Yom Kippur, I had the good fortune of throwing up on him. It was epic. He was so mad—I ruined his jacket and there was no salvation to be found. I wonder now if he’s actually forgiven me. 

That’s a cute version of a much harder and much more common problem. How do you stay in community and especially in religious community or in prayer community with people you don’t like? Or worse, how do you do so with people who you think are wrong? 

It’s a hard thing for human beings to do. The anthropological origins of community lay in finding people who keep you feeling safe and staying close to them. We all still want that, but today we have the luxury of protecting ourselves from the injury of the presence of others by deciding where we want to live, or in finding fellowship with strangers online, rather than with our neighbors. It is just downright countercultural today to decide to stay close to those who you think of as wrongdoers or evildoers.

In prayer spaces, this is especially complicated. The whole discourse of prayer, what we do when we pray, is that we talk about and we think about what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong. We’re supposed to spend our time on the high holidays, in particular, on the ways that we failed and disappointed others. But if you’re surrounded by people who you disagree with, it’s probably human nature to get distracted from that introspection by nursing the wounds from the times that they grieved you.

Jews these days level accusations at one another of being “un-Jews” or “bad Jews.” Do we really have to stay in shul together? One year, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, I was sent an incredibly nasty podcast in which I was the object of incredible ad hominem attacks. I actually couldn’t think about much else throughout the services on those two days, and I shudder to think about what it would’ve felt like to have to stand next to that person in my synagogue as he beat his chest, not apologizing to me, but still performing his piety.

As if to acknowledge this, there’s a strange piece of liturgy muttered quietly at the outset of Yom Kippur in most Ashkenazi synagogues. You could miss it as we zip right past it to the cantor’s dramatic reading of the more popular and better known Kol Nidre prayer. But this line says: “With the consent of the court on high, and with the consent of the court below, we permit praying with transgressors.” 

What? Aren’t we all sinners right now, entering a place of repentance? Isn’t this whole thing that we’re about to do about the possibility of forgiveness? What does it mean that some people are sinners, and that we’re both naming that out loud and letting them pray with us? 

There’s long history of folks who try to figure out where the phrase comes from and what it literally means. Some speculate that it comes from the Iberian Peninsula, related to Conversos, folks who converted to Christianity temporarily and tried to awkwardly come back into their communities. That’s probably not where it’s from. It’s probably earlier than that. Maybe from the 13th century. It doesn’t really matter. It’s possible that the meaning is far more banal than a particular historical moment when there were transgressors in our people. 

It probably pertains to the much more common experience that many Jewish communities had where they excommunicated people who did things wrong and then had to figure out how to re-invite them back into the community, or, it might be as simple as the fact that there are people in every community who are walking around having done grievously terrible things, committed transgressions, made other people feel bad, and now we have to sort out how we enter into this prayer experience together. 

So the cantor begins by announcing to everyone—you’re all entitled to be here. Those of you who are uncomfortable with that? Tough luck. Make it work. There’s something very deep about this. It’s much easier in the world of religion to kick out the evil-doers. There’s no easier way of asserting our piety than by drawing such boundaries and enforcing them. If you let the sinners stay, meanwhile, it feels like they’re ruining it for everyone. 

Why would I put my hopes in my repentance, in the possibility that I will be forgiven? Why would I put my hope in our collective repentance for this thing that we’re all doing together? Why would I put all those hopes together in the same basket as that guy over there, who as everyone knows, cheated on his wife or cheated on his taxes? Here we are, like a team, standing before God praying for mercy, and one of my starting five is that blow hard jackass who flouts our norms and flouts our rules. 

But the Talmud offers an analogy that I find gives us a useful reframe. In Tractate Keritot, the Talmud reads: Rabbi Chana bar Bizna said in the name of Rabbi Shimon Hasida, any fast that doesn’t include the sinners of Israel is not a true fast, for behold, galbanum has a foul smell, and yet the scripture counts it among the ingredients of the incense. 

Back in the temple, they used to offer up an incense offering, and that recipe for the incense offering is given in Exodus 30. The recipe includes a spice called galbanum, which apparently smelled bad. The Talmud is telling us that we have to include sinners in our community on our fast days, as the Temple included this spice. And it’s not because the smelly thing ultimately marries well together in the pot with other good ingredients, like combining Samin Nosrat’s “salt, fat, acid, heat” to make something delicious. 

No, the Talmud takes for granted that it might actually stink a little bit. It might make the whole concoction smell, but that there’s no real fast day for the people of Israel without including those who are foul smelling. 

The Talmud suggests that a prayer community that seeks redemption has to be a community of difference. And don’t make it easy, like a community of difference, where everyone has something complimentary to offer, like a potluck. Make it like the true people of Israel, full of sinners and saints, transgressors and boundary keepers. We may like things nice and neat, but it turns out that God in God’s heavenly court, which we can only try to imitate down here, only finds the messy version of us compelling. That bad odor we can’t tolerate in others? That’s a sweet savor to God. 

It’s a radical claim to say that you have to try to pray alongside those from whom you feel alienated. Sometimes you are the transgressor, sometimes you are the aggrieved from others’ transgressions. Still, we declare every Yom Kippur that there’s something wrong about our all-too-human impulse to find communities that are morally homogenous. We commit instead to the idea that inclusion trumps uniformity, that we should work a lot harder to build prayer communities and really pray in them, together with people who our tradition allows us to keep thinking of as sinners. 

I recently heard about a friend who was so continually put off by his community’s stance on Israel that he left his synagogue and now prays alone.

It is understandable and human to feel that if you believe that the stance of the community that you belong to is immoral, that those people are sinners, that you will suffer spiritually to be in their presence, and I imagine they feel the same way about him. Still, I found this story unbelievably, almost unspeakably sad. 

I don’t begrudge how difficult that decision must have been for him. The pain you need to feel to choose loneliness must be severe. But I wonder what happens when we let this idea about praying with sinners change the very notion of how we think about community itself. I wonder what happens when we challenge ourselves to make our communities places that can absorb this level of difference instead of making us expel ourselves or others.

So next time in synagogue, take in the smells and sounds of others. There are going to be people singing off key, ruining the harmony. There are gonna be others whose actions are off key, challenging our sense of good and bad. What a perfect environment to offer something unusual to God, something of all of us that could lift us beyond ourselves.

Jessica: That was Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Harmon Institute and host of Identity/Crisis, a podcast that creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. 

Sometimes the moments when we gather to pray together can put our communal and personal disagreements into sharper focus instead of connecting us more deeply to the Jewish people. But as Yehuda points out, our liturgy is prepared for that. Inviting us on Yom Kippur, the day when the stakes are highest, to pray alongside even the people who we might consider transgressors. This orientation reminds us that our spiritual lives actually need prayer communities that are diverse, not uniform.

It’s not only our spiritual lives that benefit from this exercise. Making our communities a microcosm of the diversity of the Jewish people as a whole helps link us to that larger sense of peoplehood. This invitation from Jewish liturgy to connect with the full spectrum of the Jewish people is not limited to Yom Kippur.

Rabbi Yael Splansky has spent her career trying to help members of her community see prayer and liturgy as a bridge between themselves and the Jewish people. She even created a siddur for her community to connect past and present, and to bring her congregants into this centuries old and global conversation.

Yael, I’m so grateful to be in conversation with you today. 

Yael: Good to be with you, Jessica. Thank you. 

Jessica: It’s a really huge project to edit a siddur while working full-time. Many Jews rely on history or current events to connect to the story of our people, to the Jewish people. But you, you chose to invest really heavily in relying on prayer as a way to connect Jews to the greater picture of the Jewish people. How can a siddur spark a conversation like that? And who’s in the conversation other than the individual holding that sea door and God? 

Yael: Great. So when my three sons were little, we would play a game in the Sukkah called the Ushpizin Time Machine. And the Sukkah was treated like a vehicle for time travel. Each person at the table would take a turn picking the person from history that they would like to meet, and they would pick the question that they would want to ask that person. As the kids grew, we dropped off the funny noises and movements that were meant to create that sense of moving through time, but we continued on with the Ushpizin Time Machine. The figures they chose became more obscure, and the questions they chose to ask became more complex. 

But this exercise in imagination remained a very powerful exercise in belonging. This game, which we still sometimes play even now that they are grown, reinforces how they see themselves, how I see myself as being wrapped up with the Jewish people and the Jewish story—which, of course, transcends time and space. 

So I think the prayer book does the very same thing. Our ancestors have left their fingerprints on every page for us to notice, to ask, to listen, to consider. And it was a real privilege and a great responsibility to edit a prayer book for my congregation. Every footnote, every note in the margin is intended to illuminate the prayer themes, page by page, and invite the person at prayer to join in the conversation. 

Jessica: Even from the outset of creating the siddur and putting it in people’s hands, you were saying to them, this is part of a larger project and you are part of a larger project that’s been going on for centuries and across time and space, just like your Ushpizin Time Machine.

Yael: I think sometimes people assume that they are very different from the generations that came before. The default assumption is that we are in a unique generation, thinking unique thoughts, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the default position ought to be that we are just the next generation in this shalshelet hadorot, you know, this chain of the generations, and that chances are if we ask a good question, somebody before us has already asked it and done their best to answer it. 

This siddur, Birkhei Kodesh, begins with a quote from the Kotzker Rebbe, from Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk: “‘When you stand on the bottom of a ladder, you check the first rung to see if it is sturdy and strong, and only then do you proceed to climb to the next rung. Such is the way with prayer. You must proceed step by step, rung by rung.’ Siddur Birkhei Kodesh is an invitation to construct one’s own ladder toward the divine and to ascend in thought, belief, and action. Gathered in our sanctuary surrounded by the sounds of our tradition and buoyed by the company of our people, we are likely to find much needed comfort, direction and joy. And yet there are many real and imagined stumbling blocks on the way to sincere prayer. Some don’t yet read Hebrew. Some don’t yet know the melodies. Some feel estranged from communal ritual. Some fear they will be judged for what they don’t believe. 

Siddur Birkhei Kodesh is offered to overcome these obstacles, to open the prayer experience to your people and to open your people to the experience of meaningful prayer. This prayer book is designed for the diverse community of seekers and skeptics, celebrants and mourners, traditionalists and newcomers, agnostics and activists, learners and leaders. All are invited to turn these pages and discover what compels us as Jews, the ideas or expressions of faith, which draw us closer to God and to one another.”

Jessica: What a beautiful invitation.

That was Yael Splansky, Senior Rabbi of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, and Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute. 

I love the way Yael described her sukkah and the siddur as time machines. There is something magical about inhabiting a structure that’s meant to connect us to the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, or reciting ancient words and contemporary liturgy that actually puts us into a story Jews have been living and creating for millennia. And in placing ourselves in that story, we also reaffirm our connection with Jews across the world today. 

Another way our liturgy urges us to tether ourselves to the Jewish people is through prayers written in the plural. Through engaging with a rabbinic teaching Rabbi Akiva Mattenson posits that if we attune ourselves to the repeated declarations of our God or our ancestors, we can draw closer to the Jews who recited these words before us, and the millions of others who to this day are committed to the project of furthering Judaism and Jewish peoplehood. 

Akiva: Rabbi Elazar ben Achmi said: When our father Yaakov was drifting toward death, he was brooding in his heart and saying, I’ve given birth to 12 sons. Maybe they won’t serve the holy one. Maybe there’s foreign worship among them. 

So what did he do? He called all of his sons and brought them before his bed. When they had come to him, he said to them, gather round and listen, children of Yaakov. They said to him, what is it that you want? He said to them, listen to the Holy Blessed One whom your father serves, and serve him yourselves. They said to him, shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem echad, listen, Yisrael, Hashem our God is one. To this day, they say each day, listen, Yisrael, listen, Yisrael, who lies resting in Ma’arat Hamachpela, Hashem our God is one. Devarim Rabbah, Parashat Ve-etchanan. 

Sometimes I catch myself brooding in my heart, like our ancestor Yaakov, or Yisrael, as he is sometimes known. Unlike Yaakov, I’m not led there through feeling close to life’s end, but by weighty feelings of communal despair. Are we as a people coming apart? Will the fraying threads of rope binding us to each other finally snap? And what will it take to hold those threads together? 

When I feel saddled by these anxious questions, this midrash comes back to me, and in its depiction of Yaakov’s sons, a microcosm of our people, it gives me hope and direction. On the edge of death, burdened by worries about the future about whether his children will continue to care about the God he’s loved and served, Yaakov/Yisrael gathers them and asks them to listen. 

The line Yaakov’s sons use in reply, Shema Yisrael, might be familiar to you. It’s the first line of the Shema prayer recited by Jews to this day. Yet through this teaching, it carries new meaning. When first uttered by Moshe in the Book of Devarim, it is a call to the people of Israel to affirm their fidelity to God: Listen, Yisrael Hashem, our God, is one. 

But here, in the mouths of Yaakov’s children, it is, as Rabbi Tali Adler puts it, not only a pledge of loyalty to God, but to their dying father as well. Through the eyes of our midrash, our relationship to God and to our ancestors gets blurred together. Our love for one is tied to our love for the other. Our promises to one are the same as our promises to the other. 

What is still more striking, our midrash suggests that this new earthy and familial meaning is there every time we recite the Shema. It is as though we are speaking to Yaakov or Yisrael, calling to him from his final resting place, telling him that we, his children, are still committed to the very same singular God that he devoted his life to.

Every time I return to this midrashic story, I can’t help but imagine that Yaakov’s children did not  all agree on what it means to serve and love God, let alone who God even is. I can’t help imagining that they might have understood God very differently than their father Yaakov did. But their willingness to say, “Listen, Yisrael Hashem, our God, is one” signals that these differences were less important to them in that moment. They were able to hear in Yaakov’s faith a version of their own faith, even if not identical in every way, and they were able with integrity to promise to carry on their father’s legacy of faith. 

Imagine a grandmother on her deathbed, worried about whether her grandchildren will carry on caring about Judaism or the Jewish people or the land of Israel. Her many grandkids all have different relationships to these things than she did, and they disagree with one another deeply about what caring about Judaism could or should even mean. Some might even feel strongly that the idea of loving the land of Israel is dangerous and misguided. Still, if these grandchildren can gather round their grandmother’s deathbed, and together commit to carrying on her commitments to the Jewish people, it will mean that they manage to figure out how to see and hear their own political and religious commitments as an echo and continuation of hers.

To say that Hashem our God is one is not to state a fact. It is to announce a task—the task of finding our way across our different words, concepts, and ideologies, toward a sense of our shared human concerns, desires, and hopes. It’s the task of learning to see ourselves in warm conversation with Jews across time and space, engaged in a shared project of service of God, whether we would all call it that or not.

In making that declaration, we aren’t just committing to God, we’re committing to each other, to figuring out how we, all of us, can say with honesty that we do after all care about the same things. 

What the early stages called simply “prayer,” and what we call Shemonah Esrei, or the Amidah, begins by referring to God as our God and the God of our ancestors. This is the work. In some sense,  if we can’t learn to say “our God” in the plural, if we can’t learn to say “God of our ancestors,” drawing together the past and the present, then we will have failed to make contact with the address of prayer. To pray first requires this work of becoming a people who understand one another, who appreciate one another’s commitments.

So Israel, if you’re listening, Hashem is our God, Hashem is one.

Jessica: That was Akiva Mattenson, faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute and a content advisor for this podcast. 

Right now, our people seem at once more connected and more scattered than ever before. We can more easily stay aware of and even visit Jews around the globe. But we also have grown distant from one another, separated by how we understand Jewish tradition, by politics, by our sense of safety and agency in our local communities, and by so much more. Is it possible for prayer to serve as a source of connection for this disparate group of people?

The rabbis of the ancient world also wondered about how God could possibly listen to so many diverse prayers. And one answer, a midrash from e has captured my imagination since I first encountered it. In the Midrash, an angel collects all these prayers from communities all over the world and weaves them together into a crown. Once that crown is complete, the angel places it on God’s head. 

I can’t really picture God as having a head that can hold a crown or even ears to listen to our prayers with, but when I think about this midrash, I picture our prayers—those prescribed by ancient custom and those that emerge unbidden from within us and everything in between, all getting wrapped up and fashioned into a magnificent celestial adornment. I imagine our blessings and our pleas whispered to God on a loop.

And while we may be disconnected here on earth, if nowhere else, at least in this one divine accessory, there’s a writhing ticker tape of yearning and gratitude that encapsulates the hearts of the entire Jewish people. The question of what it means to pray as a people is a thread that winds its way through so much of Jewish prayer.

The conversations with rabbis and scholars featured in each episode of this show inspired our team to start talking about prayer too. As we did, we encountered a range of diverse and thoughtful perspectives among our colleagues at Hartman, and so we invited them into the studio so that they could share some of their own thoughts on prayer. You’ll be able to listen to the beautiful and far reaching things they had to say in a bonus episode. 

As we come to the end of this series, I want to return to the name of the show, Thoughts & Prayers, a phrase used so frequently in response to tragedy that it has lost the meaning it’s trying to convey in moments when sincerity matters most.

As we heard throughout this show, prayer, like religion, has been challenged by modern life, by fraying communal bonds and skepticism and exhaustion. The guests in each episode offered ways they navigate these complexities and opportunities in their own lives and leadership, and they showed me and us ways that prayer can be meaningful, even when we’re skeptical of whether it works or when we’re unsure about how we are connected to a larger sense of community. 

Our spiritual lives are often left unexamined. Mostly, we just keep going through our routines. Creating this podcast reminded me that talking about prayer can, in and of itself, be a deeply spiritual and authentic expression of purpose and meaning, and that making space to reflect on our relationship to prayer and our prayer practices can be powerful opportunities for connection to others and to Jewish tradition. 

The rabbis who taught about the angel who gathers up our prayers probably had very specific kinds of praying in mind. When I think about that angel’s job though, I imagine the angel collecting prayers that come from all different kinds of siddurim, and prayers that come from hospital beds and blessings over skinned knees, and prayers for lost objects, and prayers of gratitude for real-life miracles. 

But I also think the prayers in that crown include conversations like the ones featured in this show, and the conversations you’re having about prayer, too. All of these varied connections to prayer get woven together into one tapestry, encapsulating the complex and diverse texture of Jewish spirituality.